"for everyone who has seen their life in ruins, and found the courage to dream regardless of it"

Tag Archives: broken

“It’s like I’m sleepwalking, and I don’t know how to wake up…”Mary, on Reign (TV series)

This quote kind of struck me, may be because it rings so true for me. It’s like I gave myself an allowance to check out of my life for a moment so I can recover 3 years ago, and I never checked back in. Or I check in and out depending on how I feel. Like I’m asleep for years, and I only wake up every once in a while, like I’m in a dream, and I know it’s my choice what I do, and I still can’t stop myself sometimes. Four and a half years ago, I was raped. And when I was ready to stop denying it and destroying myself, I started this blog as a sort of sounding board for my recovery process. I have been doing a lot better lately, but I need to start writing here again. I know I do. I do, because when I write, I push myself, and I discover things about myself I didn’t know.

Otherwise, I have reached a point where my life is getting more and more NORMAL, and I am afraid.

I’m afraid that I still have some important issues I haven’t solved, but that I can live with those. That I can totally let them untouched and push them down again, until I start thinking they are just part of my character. When I started this blog I was the type of person that can make a HUGE deal out of small stuff, but when it came to the big, important emotions, I pushed them down so no one would know they were there. Writing here, trying to regain myself after the rape, it opened me up and I became aware of so much about myself that I was ignoring before. I don’t want to go back to pushing things down.

For the past months, while I was moving my life into more positive direction, I also concentrated in clearing my past- writing, counseling, solving. And then I stopped writing in present tense, and stopped dealing with the emotional issues in my present. Continue reading →

There is this moment while I’m in THAT summer, the one where I got abused, and the one where all my ethical and moral beliefs crashed. I have lost myself. I’m hurt, I’m bruised, I’m emotionally and mentally tired. I run out of my house in some childish fit, unable to control myself. I circle the streets I know, and I walk. I walk randomly and with no direction. I walk until I can’t feel my legs. I watch straight in front of me, pale like a ghost, scared to face what happens if I stop walking and actually think about what happened to me.

The word of it, the formulation, r-a-p-e, doesn’t even occur to me.

I always had those ideas about things, you know? You think you know, even if you hadn’t experienced something, you think you know how awful it is. Some of us get close to the truth. What happened to me feels much bigger than that. What a fool I was! Have I known anything til that moment, anything at all? Had I really thought education was going to help me have a brighter life, get as far away as I can from the bad things in life? Stupid, stupid girl. What is happening to me?

That summer, I do and say a lot of things that aren’t quite me. That summer, and every moment after that. Something within me has snapped, broken, torn. I have no idea what it is, but I can’t find logic in anything at that point. I can not find as many reasons to stop myself from things that I have previously found low, unethical, immoral, wrong. But my body hurts, and my soul hurts, everything I can feel is just pain. Some things just stop making sense.

You would think that this is the moment my faith really starts to waiver, but it wasn’t.

It’s not when I am laying bruised on my bed in a foreign country, wondering when will it end. It’s not when I go home and I can’t handle anyone touching me, or coming close near me. It’s not when writing my home works and going to parties stop making sense, or I stop recognizing my body in the mirror. It’s not when I try to make out with a guy, and completely freeze. It’s when I have graduated, started a good relationship, move to a new place where I feel safe and at home. It’s when I start dancing, and meeting new people, and making money online, as I have dreamed of for a while. It’s when all the things that I have wanted start happening, and I can finally feel SAFE.

It’s when I stop waking up panicking that the relative security I have in the dormitories or back in my parents house will be gone soon. It’s when I start living again. I have spend 2 years having nightmares, running from the truth, or dealing with it, and trying to rebuild my life. I have spend 2 years, knowing that everything can fall apart any moment.

The moment I am SAFE, that is the moment I fully loose any shred of faith I was holding onto.

I meet a friend recently, who saw my statuses in facebook and somehow managed to understand that I wasn’t okay. I had promised her we will talk in person.

I’m not sure yet if I want to tell her, so I leave it up to feeling.

Deep breath.

We talk long about things, going around the issue. She has heard enough to be aware that something big has happened and I’m struggling going through it.

“I don’t care what it is, ” she tells me.“And whether you will tell me now, or in a year, or in two. All I care is for you to be good and happy. It doesn’t matter what happened. It was in the past, leave it there. It’s over. Do now what will make you happy.”

I look at her for a second, making sure what I will say will be the right thing. Something in her tone tells me she rather doesn’t want to know what happened to me. I can’t blame her. I don’t want to know.

This post I won’t add a positive thing for the day, because the whole post is about positive change. While I’m still weary about not recovering as fast as I’d wish to, I do have 2 pretty big realizations this week.

Sometimes in life, we have to work towards realizations, but sometimes they just fall upon us. So these 2, just came to me. Ok, no, I would like to think I have earned them. I have spend 4 months going over details of my past, I would rather not relive. I relived them, thought over them, and fried in my own special hell in efforts to reinvent my life.

I was showering today, when my eye was caught by one of the tiles on the floor, which was now, for some reason, broken. I caught myself looking at it for a while like hypnotized, not being able to see anything else from the floor but that broken tile.

Than it occurred to me that lately that is how I have been looking at my life. I picked apart every piece around what happened that summer, to understand, to remember, and eventually- to heal myself.

Only just like with my floor, I lost sight of why I was looking there, and started staring. Just because one tile is broken, doesn’t mean the floor is ruined. Just because something very traumatic happened to you, doesn’t mean you get to feel broken forever.

One day this week I was seeing one of my best friends, and one of the small number of people who knew about what happened to me.

“Do you think I’m different than before? You know, before that?” yeah, we both know what I mean- my recent admission of being raped 2 years ago.

“You are, ” she said “I’m just not sure exactly how.”

I started to wonder. Was it that I was different, in obvious way, was it that I was sure she saw change in me, or was it me feeling that change? I had been actively trying to recover for weeks, and while there was obvious change for better, sometimes I still felt like my life was marked by something too big to heal from.

Healing, of course, is much different than changing a tile. It’s a lot harder and requires a lot more knowledge, effort and courage. But there’s something else though. Just like changing a tile, it’s possible. Is it hard? Of course it is.

But if you take your time and do it right, soon the only one who will know there was a changed tile will be you. Sometimes you can proudly point to that tile, happy you have fixed it alone, or look at it thinking that it’s obvious this part of the floor is different.

But for the most part, after a while even you won’t notice it, and will go on with your life like you usually do. Healing is possible. You have to try to look harder on all the other pretty tiles around, not only the one that is broken. It still needs to be fixed…but never forget you have a whole floor, not just one tile. Never forget that life is much more than one traumatic incident.

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QUOTES from a random post:

" So, I watched TV series instead. Because they were convenient, and colorful, and different, and because they covered that faceless, bottomless emptiness left after that guy had taken all he wanted from my body, and after I had thrown away all that he left of my soul."
---"Coping Mechanisms: TV addictions and Other Disasters", The Road to Recovery